What Square Enix learned from Final Fantasy 13's large-scale development

Square Enix had 180 artists, 30 programmers and 36 designers working on Final Fantasy 13, and that many people on board made its development complicated, director Motomu Toriyama told Gamasutra.

"With a large-scale development team, we didn't use our time well," Toriyama said. "How do you communicate to everyone in the department what the drive of the game is?"

Toriyama and his team tried to keep the game as secret as possible within the massive workforce, which led to playtesting happening "way too late in the process," he said. Square intended to fix those issues with Final Fantasy 13-2, and implemented production-based milestones as opposed to story-based ones it used at the beginning of FF13's development. Still, more needs to change.

"We are also thinking that we will not do large-scale internal development any longer," Toriyama said. "We have a lot of great creators in Square Enix, but for larger-scale development we will be doing more distributed and outsourced development to reach our targets on time."

Final Fantasy 13 Info

Description

This eagerly anticipated title takes full advantage of the PlayStation 3 system's advanced hardware, providing tangible, intuitive controls while delivering seamless transitions between real-time gameplay and stunning in-game cinematics. The latest in cutting-edge technology has been utilized in development of FINAL FANTASY XIII, thus making this newest addition to the FINAL FANTASY series worthy of the title "next generation."